Imagine Me Gone

Fiction by Adam Haslett.


https://www.barnesandnoble.com

See all those little golden and black-and-white circles on the cover of this book? That means it's a Smart People Book. I've read a few of these, and some are better than others, but they often have a certain style that (I believe) is supposed to seem lofty and intellectual. So this novel was no exception; it had a few of the usual affectations of Smart People Books, things I'm supposed to be intellectual enough to roll with.

1. The story jumps around in time without giving you any indication in the chapter headings of when it is taking place. As a Smart Person, I am supposed to take my cues from the text and discover if this is the past or present we are discussing, and how much time has elapsed since the last part.
2.  Some parts of the story take place completely inside the mind of one of the characters. However, it is not necessary for the author to enlighten the Smart Reader about these things. It is up to him or her to simply figure out if events really happened or were just imagined.
3. Quotation marks are optional. Smart People do not need such ridiculous grammatical conventions to know when someone is talking. Smart People can tell from the context if a character is speaking aloud or silently ruminating or whatever.

Unfortunately, I am not enough of a Smart Person and I find all this business a little exhausting.

All this being said, this was an interesting novel, albeit extremely dark in nature, which is also characteristic of a Smart Person book. Have you ever heard of HAPPY book winning an award? I think not. Still, the characters were believable and I wanted to know what happened to them.

I'm going to give this a tentative thumbs-up, but it's on the verge of a half up half down.